Travel Pals

Case Study • March 12, 2025

Travel Pals is an online service offering personalized travel recommendations and a holistic booking experience across mobile and desktop platforms

Research

Travel Pals is an online service offering personalized travel recommendations and a holistic booking experience across mobile and desktop platforms. Unlike existing travel apps like Google Reviews, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, which often suffer from untrustworthy or sponsored reviews, Travel Pals prioritizes authentic recommendations. Instead of relying on anonymous reviews, our platform features user-created lists shared through a social media-like feed. This approach leverages a user's personal network to curate relevant recommendations, ensuring a more trustworthy and personalized experience.

Travel Pals goes beyond simple recommendations by offering collaborative tools, including an in-app scheduler, collaborative list creation, and social features for interacting with fellow travelers. This makes Travel Pals ideal for both new and experienced travelers, whether venturing solo or in groups, and caters to anyone with a passion for exploring the world.

Design Goals

Our design goals centered on delivering a reliable, intuitive, and engaging travel planning experience. To achieve this, we prioritized the following:

Social and Collaborative Exploration:

— Personalized network-based recommendations

— Community building capabilities

Enhanced group travel planning - Authentic recommendations

— Genuine, human-sourced reviews

— Elimination of anonymous or generated reviews

— Prioritization of trusted reviews, minimizing the influence of sponsored content

Adaptive design:

— Multi-platform design for consistent experience

— Seamless access across desktop and mobile

Effortless booking:

— Simplified booking process

— Smooth transitions from discovering activities to booking

Intuitive Design:

— Easy platform navigation

— Visually appealing design

Design Charette

We conducted a design charrette to generate initial concepts. Individually, we spent 30 minutes sketching ideas, followed by a collaborative session to synthesize a unified plan.

Mood Board

As a team, we then developed a mood board to visually establish the app's core colors, aesthetics, and themes, ensuring a cohesive design direction.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

From our sketches, we identified core features and integrated them into a single design, which we then translated into a low-fidelity prototype.

Personas

We created two personas to help personify our user base and guide the next iteration of our designs.

Scenario

To understand how Solo Sarah would engage with Travel Pals, we crafted the following user scenario:

Solo Sarah has a month to travel on her own. She wants to explore the world and get to know herself.

It is the first time she has gathered the courage to travel alone so she wants to be safe. She doesn’t want to follow a structured schedule because she is open to being spontaneous and “going with the flow”.

Sarah is a bit overwhelmed with the amount of information and forums about trips that she saw, and she’s looking for a relatable and trustworthy platform that fits her needs.

Digital Narrative

Guided by our user persona, Solo Sarah, we crafted a mid-fidelity prototype narrative outlining her journey through Travel Pals, highlighting how the platform addresses her specific needs and enhances her travel planning.

Mid-Fidelity Prototype

Usability Testing

After the mid-fi prototype was complete, we each tested the prototype with four representative users to see how intuitive Travel Pals was.

Test participants were required to have recently traveled or planned a trip. Participants were recruited by the team members and tested remotely. Each participant was recorded as they were asked to complete four tasks.

Task 1: Add “Eiffel Tower” to the calendar:

"Imagine you have free time to ravel. The place you were dreamt about visiting was Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower. How would you search this activity on the Travel Pals application?"

Task 2: Review an Activity:

“Imagine you travelled and had a fantastic experience visiting the Eiffel Tower! You want to give it a great rating. How would you go about doing this on the app?”

Task 3: Add a tour to your schedule and share with a friend:

“..The Eiffel Tower was so amazing that you want to go again with your friend. You want to schedule a tour at 8:45am. How would you go about doing this?”

Task 4: Locate Directions on Desktop:

“... Now imagine that on Jan 2nd, you have three excursions booked. You want to know where they are on a map to see the best route to take. How would you go about finding directions to your planned activities?”

Results

Task 1: Add “Eiffel Tower” to the calendar:

— All four participants were successful, with minimal confusion

— Two participants attempted to type in the search bar on the home page

— Participants were confused with the search results appearing automatically

Task 2: Review an Activity:

— All four participants successfully navigated to the ratings page

— Three participants clicked on “Rate it” and one user clicked on “Your score” to navigate to the ratings page

— All participants were confused about the strict prototype options and wanted to click “I don’t like” or “I don’t know”

Task 3: Add a tour to your schedule and share with a friend:

— All four participants successfully navigated to the search page then to the information page where they found booking information

— All four participants showed confusion at the

completion of the task, and expected a confirmation page

— Two participants navigated to their calendar page to confirm the tour had been booked

Task 4: Locate Directions on Desktop:

— All four participants successfully completed the task, but with major confusion

— All four participants initially navigated to the

calendar, but the option to find directions was too small and missed by all participants

— Two participants navigated to the Information page where they found “directions”

— The other two participants navigated to the Your Lists page where they found “see directions”

Recommendations

Based on the our test results, we made the following changes:

— Our hi-fi prototype should have the capability to type into the search bar to help minimize confusion within the prototype

— All options on the ratings page should be clickable

— Our mobile prototype should match the desktop prototype in giving a dropdown option to pick a date when booking a tour

— A shared calendar confirmation should be added after successfully booking a tour. The confirmation should lead to the user’s calendar to further confirm that the tour was scheduled

— The hi-fi prototype calendar should be interactive and allow users to change the viewed date

— We should add a “toggle to map” option on the calendar so users can easily see the location of each activity within their daily schedule

— We recommend that the “find directions” on the calendar page is in a bigger font and placed next to a map icon for better viewability

— The discover page should be changed to the map view and include activity information in the form of pins

— The search page should be included on the home page as a dropdown

— We will add an “X” icon on all pop-ups to make the design consistent throughout

Lessons Learned

Thinking back on prototype journey, we gathered some valuable insights:

— Users may not understand the designer's perspective and goals

— Understanding what is actually important helps improve prototypes

— Designing for diverse user scenarios prevents future usability issues

— Testing the prototype reveals unexpected behaviors from users

— Features like "X" and "Back" button help users with error prevention and recovery

— Creative solutions help overcome tool limitations

— Communication and constant feedback are important for collaboration and good teamwork

— Consistency and adaptability are key for a good design

The process of building Travel Pals has been both challenging and rewarding. This learning experience helped us understand user-centered design, prototyping, user testing and teamwork from a different perspective. [/BLUEBOX]

High-Fidelity Prototype

View in Figma